Skipped
by autophagy
Summary: This is a bit different from what I usually write. It's basically a dream that I had today. This time there are no sentient tanks, but it's a Hummelverse AU where tanks are operated by only one person. It's set in the early war where there was still nations fighting each other. A Jagdtiger 88 driver is in the middle of an intense battle when they have the strangest experience.


_[This is written in first person, but I want to say that I distance myself from the character I am writing about. I also distance myself from the Nazis that show up. Things were just happening like that in my dream and I wrote them down like they happened. I'd also like to note that this seems to be very inspired by my recent WoT experiences, since I've had to fight lag quite a bit and weird things happen when you're lagging. I guess that's how my brain interpreted it.]_

The enemies were surrounding us. A light tank was just turning a corner near me, and a tank destroyer would soon follow. I caught a glimpse of a Jackson behind a hill ridge and backed up into a warehouse. Normally I would take it on, but not when a light was about to come and circle me.

I kept backing up until my Jagdtiger 88 reached the back of the building and waited. The wait was always the worst thing – You never knew where the enemy would come from and if it would be a direction that would be very bad for you. But by hiding here, I had eliminated the chances of him popping up behind me. He would have to run in front of my gun, which would be very bad for _him_.

Seconds went by in excruciating silence, while I heard distressed radio calls from my comrades.

Suddenly, the Chaffee rushed in through the gates; I planted a shot into its front but that didn't stop it. He crashed through one of the pallet piles and disappeared from my sights for a moment, and I turned around the cumbersome machine that I called my own. He wouldn't be able to circle me if I stayed here. But then he started shooting me. The shots just plinked off the Jagdtiger's thick casemate, and I realized that it was a stalling tactic. He could keep me pinned here until his friends arrived and there was nothing I could do about it except get slaughtered if they did.

But that wasn't going to happen. I took heart and made the heavy tank destroyer roll forward. The shots were telling me where the tank must have been hiding, and a pile of pallets fell over under my tracks. I fired a shot the moment I tore it down, and heard the tell-tale noise of it hitting armour. But my gun was way too powerful for this little runt; the shots just went through. As my sight cleared up, the Chaffee was right in front of me, and that of course didn't stay like that for long. I had planned to keep my side close to the wall, but now I was glad I hadn't done that, because I wouldn't have been able to turn then as the light tank started trying to get behind me. He shot my tank's side, and the shell bounced by a miracle.

My gun caught up with him as I turned, and I shot him in the side as well. That must have hurt, because the tanker immediately changed his tactic and tried to get away from me. I rammed my hull into the other tank and pushed him sideways. I couldn't shoot him like that, but if we reached the wall, I'd be easily able to crush him. That didn't happen though. The light tank managed to break free and started another attempt to circle me. He got to my side again and this time the shell broke through the armour, turning my fighting compartment into hell for a moment. My left arm really hurt but I didn't look at it and instead focused on turning my tank to protect my beaten up side.

I got my sights trained on the light tank again, but then something strange happened. As I fired, nothing happened. The Chaffee as well stopped shooting, and everything seemed to slow down. Our dance ground to a halt and I tried to shoot again, but it was like the shell just disappeared inside my cannon barrel.

For several seconds, everything stayed in this frightening, unmoving state, then my vision went black.

The next thing I knew was that I was on a highway roundabout. I almost ran over a weirdly futuristic looking car. There were more of them, stopping and honking at me. I was just completely confused. How did I get here? What the hell had happened? Where was the Chaffee? Where was…everybody?

I couldn't make a radio connection with the others anymore.

In absolute confusion, I climbed out of my tank and hopped down onto the road to get a better view of my surroundings. We were in the middle of nowhere, it seemed, but there was a surprising amount of traffic. To be fair, I had never seen more than about three cars in the same spot before. Here, at least 20 were piling up. I was blocking them with my huge tank. I looked around again, and suddenly spotted a strange blue street sign that said the name of the town where I had been fighting before this weird jump in my memory had happened. I had to go there. I needed to find out what had happened. I wanted to know if the Chaffee had made it.

"Get off the road!" someone shouted at me from inside their car. Their car window had made a strange humming noise when they had opened it. Suddenly a mini bus drove up to me and the driver and his passenger were looking at me through wide eyes through their opened window.

"Dude" one of the middle aged guys said, staring at my tank and my uniform. " _Dude_. Are you a re-enactor or something?"  
I didn't know what the word meant and shook my head. "I'm a tanker." I said. "Where's the Allies got to? Did we win?" I then asked, and got clueless looks. I frowned and looked at them. Strangely enough both of them were bald. They looked at each other.  
"This is crazy" the driver said. He turned towards me again.

"Are you trying to tell us that you're a real tanker from the war?"

My frown deepened and I nodded.

"Well buddy, sadly the war is long over, you're a bit late."  
I wasn't sure if they were joking. How should that be possible? The war was nowhere near over when I lost conscience. Was it possible that peace had come in just a few days? …And brand new cars?

"How long?" I asked, a strange fear creeping up on me.  
"For 46 years."  
I gasped. "What? You're lying!" The honking of the other cars was intensifying.  
"Nope. Look around you." the stranger said.

Unfortunately my odd surroundings supported his words. But how on earth could this have happened? Time travel? That sounded very unlikely, yet here I was, apparently far in the future.

"Where did you get that tank from?" the bald man on the passenger seat asked me, "Stole it from a museum?"  
"No" I said defensively, "It's mine."

"We should continue this discussion elsewhere" a voice from the back of the bus said. The driver nodded and motioned at my Jagdtiger with his head.  
"You should get that off the road, or the police will arrive pretty soon and they won't just have a nice little talk with you."

I didn't know who this police was, but they didn't sound like the kind of people I wanted to get in trouble with. I turned back to my tank and drove it off the road. The bus pulled over beside me, on the grass. I stuck my upper body out of the driver's hatch. The world out there seemed intimidating to me all of a sudden.

I still had trouble wrapping my head around what they had said to me.

"So you're from the past" the bus driver said, his voice not belittling though.  
"Apparently" I said, feeling patronized nevertheless.  
"If you don't believe us, we can show you a museum that's nearby. Maybe you belong there too" he continued with a grin. "Just jump in and we'll show you! It's not far away."

I didn't know if I really wanted to find out if their claims were true, but I nodded.

I didn't feel comfortable with leaving my tank behind like this, but there apparently weren't any enemies around anymore, so I just locked it and got into the mini bus.

In the backseats, two other bald men greeted me. Was this some sort of baldness cult? The bus set itself into motion and I awkwardly looked at my knees.  
"So" one of the men suddenly said, "Are you a Nazi?"  
I nodded slowly. What a strange question. Wasn't it obvious that I was German?  
"Cool" the man said. He rolled up his sleeve and a Reichsadler tattoo on his upper arm became visible. "We're too." The other man nodded.  
"Ah" I said, not knowing what to do with this strange revelation, other than note that we still existed in the future where the war was over.  
"Did you know Hitler?"  
I shook my head, but then made a thoughtful pause. "Well, I _know_ him, but he died when I was really young. I never attended any of his speeches. I never saw him in real life."

"Shame" the man said, but then they fell silent and so did I.

After a three minute drive we arrived at a town that was familiar to me - just earlier I had fought in it! But there were no tanks or signs of a fight here anymore. No wrecks, no ruins. Everything looked perfectly calm and definitely not like a place where a fight had taken place. Maybe this was all just a strange dream. I couldn't accept any other possible explanation.

We drove through the town and halted a bit outside of it on its other side. As I got out of the bus, I recognized the warehouse at once. It had changed, but I recognized the area. Without waiting for the others, I walked towards it. My stomach was turning. This was all so unreal. The doors were open and I got inside. The insides had changed dramatically. It looked like it had been divided into several rooms, and the first thing I saw let me flinch. There was a Conqueror, its barrel pointed right at me. It took me a moment to realize that it was unmanned and that I wasn't going to be shot. There was a little sign in front of it. As I got closer I could read the caption. It had some information about the tank, about its armour values and cannon. I knew these things already, so I didn't waste any time reading them. A man who was busy handling some balloons greeted me. His look turned a bit confused as he seemed to notice my uniform.

I greeted back and went on to another room. My gaze fell on a small model of a FV215b. I picked it up and looked at it from all directions, admiring how detailed it was, but then put it back. I went past a collection of Allied armour, and at the back of the room, I saw something that made me freeze.

A Chaffee. No, not just a Chaffee. It was the Chaffee I fought, I just knew it. I hurried over to it and found that I had started shaking. I touched its fender, raised my arm and let my hand run along the side armour. There was the hole my shell had left. My fingers left a trace on the dust the tank had collected. The sign in front of it read that it was found in this very warehouse, apparently put out of commission by an 88 millimetre cannon. The bad shape it had been in had indicated that it had been abandoned for at least a decade or two when it had been found at the end of the war. So it was true. It had all happened in the past. I was a relic from another time, however that had happened.

My head sunk and an intense feeling that I couldn't quite describe overcame me. It felt a bit like loss. And hopelessness. I woke up in a strange new world where I was obsolete. What would happen to me now? What would happen to my tank?  
The men I had come with had caught up to me and one of them put his hand on my shoulder.  
"Must be tough for you" he said. Either he believed my story now or he had decided that I was too much of a lunatic to believe anything but said story and that there was no point in trying to convince me otherwise.

I sighed deeply and looked at the Chaffee again. It was a cold comfort knowing that he hadn't managed to destroy my tank and kill me. But the war was lost anyway. Everyone was dead. And I was stuck here, with nowhere to go to. I had no home, no headquarters, no purpose. They were right, I probably belonged in a museum too; me and my tank both.

The following weeks were nothing like anything I had ever experienced before. The bald men had returned me to my tank, and together we had driven to the nearest police office, so I had had to deal with those policemen after all. I had no ID, and no one who fit my description was missing nearby. I was wise enough not to tell my story; they probably would have put me in a madhouse right away. I just claimed that I had no memory of how I got here, and neither about my past life or where the hell I got a working Jagdtiger from.

It was decided that I would live in a hotel for now until I could apply to a job and find a place to live. I was given a new identity, with papers and all. I even made it into the newspaper. I often met my newfound friends, the bald men, but after a while started hanging out with them less and less. They talked so much about the past, and I was starting to move on and adjust to the new life.

But the authorities didn't let me keep my tank, which hurt me deeply. It was brought to the museum I had visited, and spent a lot of time there from then on. They repaired it, and I had to admit that it looked in a better shape than it had ever done before. During all the fighting, there had been no time for cosmetic maintenance.

One of those times when I came to see it, the employee I had seen the first time already walked up to me. He started a conversation, telling me how the visitor count had increased since my tank had been added to their display. He also revealed to me that he was the owner of the museum. The thing that really made me start to listen attentively was when he mentioned an idea he had had. To make even more people come here, he had thought about using the tanks that were still in a working condition to re-enact the battles that had taken place here. I immediately started feeling uneasy about the thought that someone else would drive _my_ Jagdtiger, but then he asked me to drive it myself since I apparently knew how to do it. He basically was offering me a job. I agreed at once. I would get to use my tank again, and I would be able to fight again, even if it was only pretend.

I looked at the majestic machine in front of me and started smiling fondly. It wasn't meant to just stand around, it was meant to be used.  
"I have a request" I said, and the museum owner nodded at me, waiting for me to say it. I went on. "Please also use the Chaffee for the re-enactment. I have unfinished business with it."  
He looked mystified but agreed. My smile grew.

All eyes were on the thrilling duel in front of them. From behind barrier tape, about a hundred people were watching the Jagdtiger fight against the Chaffee. No one really listened to the narrator who read out some historical data for context, they were too absorbed by the spectacle. The Chaffee charged the tank destroyer in front of it, got to its side. The crowd gasped. It seemed like the Chaffee was at an advantage, and it fired its cannon into the other tank's side, but there only was a loud 'ding' sound. Then the Jagdtiger managed to turn enough to fire back. There was a fake explosion, but the Chaffee continued circling the slower tank. It was rammed but managed to escape and brought some distance between itself and its enemy.  
"Help will arrive soon, so all the Chaffee has to do is to stall" the loudspeakers informed the crowd, "But the Jagdtiger isn't making it easy for him."  
The Jagdtiger backed up, but a moment later the other tank appeared to its side again. The heavy tank destroyer managed to turn in time and landed another hit on the Chaffee, which ended the battle. The Chaffee stopped and started smoking.

I looked through my gun sights and felt exhilaration. Finally I had been able to witness the end of the battle, after all this time. It felt like I could finally leave the past behind me. Now the next thing that would happen was that the Jackson would appear and "destroy" my tank, but even though I hadn't liked the idea at first, I couldn't have cared less right then.

I could only enjoy the feeling for a moment though. A second later, everything went black.

My sights were trained at the light tank. Suddenly, my surroundings had changed, instead of spectators there were piles of pallets around me. I had no time to be confused. I pulled the trigger, and the Chaffee drove into one of the piles before it stopped.

What was going on? Hadn't I just been in a re-enactment, in the future? Why was I back in my time, seemingly? Had it really just been a weird daydream? It had to be. I shook my head. It would have been too unrealistic to be true. One couldn't just black out for a moment and wake up years in the future. It must have been the stress making me space out. I ran my hand across the controls of my Jagdtiger, feeling how real it was, other than my illusion. My eyes welled up with tears as I fully realized that I had just gotten my old life back.

A sudden noise made me look up, and all I saw was the rear of a Jackson disappear from my field of view. A moment later, the American tank's shell burst through the Jagdtiger's side armour and ended all life inside it.


End file.
